I sat cross-legged on the floor of my tiny rented room at the inn, staring at the flickering candle in front of me like it owed me money. The wax had melted unevenly, pooling in strange shapes, like a graph of a function that had somehow become self-aware and decided to defy continuity just to spite me.

  The floor creaked beneath me. The distant murmur of patrons in the common hall below drifted through the wooden walls. Someone sneezed.

  Secluded cultivation, indeed.

  I took a deep breath. My goal was simple: figure out why I was manifesting effects without qi. Logically speaking, this was impossible.

  Then again, so was the Banach-Tarski paradox, and yet here we were.

  The memories of the old Jiang Lingwu told me exactly how I should be doing this. First, calm the mind. Second, draw my focus inward. Third, examine the state of my dantian and circulate my qi.

  Step three was, of course, impossible. Because I had no qi. None. Not even a single stray iota.

  But that was what I needed to confirm.

  I took another deep breath, trying to channel my memories of the old Jiang Lingwu’s meditation practices. It was difficult. Trying to meditate with someone else’s instincts was like reading about how an MRI machine worked and then being asked to build one out of spare parts and good intentions. I had never been good at meditation back on Earth — every time I tried, my brain would decide that right now was the best time to remember all my past embarrassments in vivid detail.

  I ignored the mental image of twelve-year-old me mispronouncing ‘organism’ in front of my entire biology class and focused inward.

  At first, there was nothing. Just the familiar sense of being inside my own body, of bones and muscles and organs. The ordinary, mortal self.

  Then, deeper.

  The dantian should have been there.

  A normal dantian — a functional one — would have been a concentrated node, a closed domain of power, a space that existed in a way that normal anatomy could not explain. If qi were a fluid, then the dantian was the flask that held it. A perfect, abstract sphere; a topological entity lacking concrete description but existing in the mind as a locus of condensed power.

  Mine was gone.

  Not merely damaged. Not cracked or blocked.

  Gone. Disintegrated.

  I had known this, logically. I had been the one to destroy it, after all. But knowing something was broken and actually seeing the absence of what should be there were two entirely different things. It was the difference between knowing a window had shattered and actually pressing your hand against where the glass used to be, only to find nothing but empty air.

  The space where my dantian had once been was hollow, utterly vacant, as though something had scooped it out with surgical precision.

  I swallowed.

  Had I somehow annihilated it completely?

  The thought sat heavy in my mind, unwelcome but insistent, like a rogue term in an equation that refused to cancel out. That wasn’t how a shattered dantian was supposed to work. A damaged dantian was like a cracked cauldron — still there, still functional in the loosest sense, but leaking qi constantly, unable to hold power properly. If a cultivator lost their dantian, they usually suffered for it. They would feel the absence, the energy bleeding out into nothing, the slow withering of their meridians like a body deprived of nourishment.

  But mine?

  Nothing. No pain. No lingering remnants. No sense of loss.

  Just absence.

  It was like my dantian had been erased. Like a particle and an antiparticle colliding and annihilating each other, leaving behind only energy.

  Had I, in a moment of inexperience, fresh to the experiences of life in a xianxia world, reduced my dantian to a state of such utter nothingness that even the idea of it had been erased?

  I sucked in a slow breath, steadying my nerves. No. Speculation was pointless without data.

  I needed an experiment.

  I reached under my bed, retrieving the small wooden box that contained the last remnants of my past life — sect-issued robes, a few old scrolls, and the spirit stones I had never exchanged. They were standard-grade, nothing particularly valuable, but still precious in a way. These were my emergency funds, the last bridge between me and the world of cultivators. I had avoided selling them because the only place to do so was in the cities, and cities meant sect-affiliated merchants, which meant cultivator politics.

  I did not want to get a table flipped on me just because I looked wrongly at some young master at a teahouse.

  Jiang Lingwu’s memories told me how this was supposed to work. Qi absorption was a simple process — well, simple for someone with a functioning dantian. One guided the external energy inward, allowing it to cycle through the meridians before condensing it into the core. It was supposed to be as natural as breathing for a trained cultivator.

  I had no idea what would happen in my case.

  I closed my eyes, steadied my breath, and followed the familiar motions stored in my borrowed muscle memory. Focus. Draw in the energy. Direct it inward.

  Nothing happened.

  At least, not at first.

  I sat there, legs folded, hands resting on my knees, doing my best impression of someone achieving enlightenment. The faint glow of the spirit stones did not waver. The air remained still. The universe, unbothered by my presence, continued as usual.

  I frowned and tried again, this time with more determination. What lingered of Jiang Lingwu’s instincts guided my breathing, his muscle memory shaping the flow of energy, but I felt nothing. No warmth, no pull, no whisper of power. Just stillness.

  Fine. This was fine. Science was all about patience.

  I exhaled slowly, relaxing my posture. If it wasn’t working, I wasn’t going to force it.

  My thoughts drifted, unbidden.

  Was this why cultivators sought seclusion? Not just for enlightenment, but for the clarity that came from complete isolation? André Weil had done his most groundbreaking mathematical work while imprisoned. With nothing else to do, no distractions, no external pressures, he had turned his mind inward and reshaped mathematics itself.

  Perhaps this was something similar.

  I had spent my days guiding students, avoiding trouble, and, despite my best efforts, becoming involved in things beyond my understanding. But now? Now I had space.

  Time.

  Purpose.

  The candle flickered. The air grew heavier, or perhaps I only imagined it.

  I inhaled again, slower this time. Focused.

  Minutes stretched into hours. The faint noises of the inn faded from my awareness. Time lost meaning. The outside world became distant.

  Then —

  A flicker.

  The tiniest, faintest shift.

  Like the space around me had wobbled, for just an instant.

  I opened my eyes.

  The spirit stones were gone.

  I blinked.

  Looked around.

  Checked under my sleeves.

  No trace. No dust. No lingering energy in the air.

  I exhaled slowly.

  Alright. Something had happened.

  I reached inward, expecting… something. Anything. Some feeling of increased strength, or a reservoir of energy, or even just the faintest shift in my internal balance.

  But there was nothing.

  The void in my center remained unchanged, untouched, as if nothing had entered it at all.

  I had absorbed the energy.

  And yet, my dantian was still empty.

  That didn’t make sense.

  Qi didn’t just vanish. It had to go somewhere. Even if my dantian had been shattered, even if I had somehow managed to consume the spirit stones improperly, I should have felt something.

  Instead, there was only void.

  But not just a simple void. Not the structured emptiness of a missing piece in a puzzle, nor the mere absence of a container waiting to be filled. No, this was something else entirely.

  The energy had entered my body. That much was undeniable. The spirit stones were gone. Their faint glow had vanished, consumed by the gaping non-space where my dantian should have been. Yet, when I reached inward, seeking even the smallest trace of gathered qi, there was nothing.

  Nothing, as in no sensation of energy pooling within me.

  Nothing, as in not even the faintest ripple of qi shifting along my meridians.

  Nothing, as in a void so absolute that it should not have been possible.

  At first, I entertained the possibility that I had failed. Maybe I had absorbed the energy incorrectly. Maybe I had inadvertently dispersed it into the environment, scattering it into useless entropy like a poorly insulated circuit. Maybe there was some step in qi absorption that my damaged, mortal shell simply couldn’t perform.

  But the more I thought about it, the less sense that made. Energy didn’t just vanish. Even the crudest alchemical waste left behind some residue. If my dantian were completely gone, then the energy should have spilled elsewhere — perhaps leaking into my body chaotically, seeping into my bones, stagnating in my limbs. I should have felt something.

  Instead, there was only nothing.

  I exhaled slowly, dragging a hand down my face.

  Right. I had read about this sort of thing before.

  Void cultivation was the kind of absurd concept that appeared in xianxia novels whenever an author wanted to justify a protagonist breaking all known rules of qi circulation. It usually came with grandiose names, ranging from the mildly poetic to the outright ridiculous:

  The Boundless Abyss Devouring Art.

  The Infinite Hollow Meridian Sutra.

  The Absolute Nihility Divine Codex.

  The Grand Mystic Dao of No-Dao (Which Transcends All Dao and is Therefore the True Dao).

  And, of course, my personal favorite from a particularly egregious MTL:

  [Insert Profound Cultivation Technique Name Here]

  Most of these techniques were little more than theoretical nonsense, the sort of thing you read but didn't question. They promised their practitioners infinite growth through paradoxical means — absorbing qi yet not absorbing qi, existing outside the cycle of the heavens yet somehow surpassing it, breaking through realms without a bottleneck because they cultivated ‘nothingness’ instead of ‘something’.

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  It was all very impressive-sounding, right up until you realised that the authors didn’t understand set theory.

  I mostly just shut my brain off when reading those novels and waited for the dopamine hit to kick in. Now, sitting here, staring into the empty space where my dantian should be, I was beginning to wonder if maybe some of them had been onto something.

  The problem was that void cultivation, as typically described in fiction, had always been a contradiction. It was supposed to be a state of existence where qi was neither gathered nor expelled, where energy passed through a person like light through glass, where the absence of something paradoxically became a source of power.

  But I wasn’t dealing with a paradox.

  I was dealing with mathematics.

  Something about my situation adhered too perfectly to mathematical structure. The energy hadn’t been lost. It hadn’t been scattered. It had entered my body and disappeared, not into nothingness, but into something so fine, so fractured, so infinitesimally dispersed that it no longer registered as existing in any one place —

  Wait.

  I swallowed hard.

  I needed to check something.

  Closing my eyes again, I reached inward — not seeking qi, but seeking structure. Seeking any kind of internal framework that might explain why the energy was vanishing without a trace.

  At first, it was the same as before. A vast emptiness, an absence of form, a void without center or boundary.

  But then, as I focused — really focused — I saw it.

  Not a single entity. Not a sphere of condensed power, nor a broken remnant of a dantian.

  Instead, there were points.

  Tiny, dust-like specks, scattered so finely that no matter where I looked, there was no one place they gathered. No neighborhood where I could say, ‘Yes, this is where my energy went!’

  No continuous structure to contain anything.

  Just a collection of infinitesimally small points.

  And yet… I knew, instinctively, that these points were where the qi had gone. They were absorbing the energy, but because they occupied a space of measure zero, the energy felt like it had disappeared entirely.

  I felt my breath catch in my throat.

  Cantor dust.

  I had turned my dantian into Cantor dust.

  The realisation struck like a thunderclap in my mind.

  At first, I refused to believe it. Surely, it was just fragmented, a shattered remnant scattered into minuscule grains, like sand too fine to be gathered again. But no — this was something else entirely. This wasn’t a finite fragmentation, nor even a mere countable infinity of specks.

  This was an uncountable infinity of points.

  A structure where qi entered, only to be absorbed across an infinite-dimensional nowhere. A set that was nowhere dense — no matter how closely one examined any part of it, there was never enough substance to form a continuous whole. No region of measure greater than zero, no connected structure that could act as a vessel.

  And yet, it still existed. It still absorbed.

  This wasn’t just void cultivation. This wasn’t some xianxia technique spouting profound-sounding contradictions. This was a mathematical entity more terrifying than anything in those novels.

  I had seen diagrams of this in my past life. I had given them a cursory read in fascination and terror, yet without understanding. For how could I? I had been a biologist with an interest in mathematics but never took the time to fully understand all its rigour. I had read about Georg Cantor, that pioneer who had dared to map infinities themselves. He had realised — shocked and bewildered — that the real numbers between 0 and 1 were not just infinitely many, but uncountably so, beyond the mere countable infinity of the whole numbers. He had grasped a truth so counterintuitive that even the mathematicians of his time had recoiled in horror.

  Cantor had peered into the abyss of infinite sets and found that it did not follow the logic of mortal minds. He had seen something that shook the very foundations of mathematics, something so profound that it had led him to a life of chronic depression and stays in sanatoriums.

  And now, I was staring at that same abyss.

  He had famously wrote: “I see it, but I do not believe it!”

  I understood him now.

  I had dispersed my qi barely a few minutes into my arrival in this world. In that single moment, in my conviction to sever myself from cultivation, I had performed an act so precise, so absolute, that it had transcended any ordinary fragmentation.

  I hadn’t merely broken my dantian. I had taken it and recursively shattered it in such a way that the process had continued indefinitely, reducing it to an infinite dust that held measure zero, yet still existed everywhere within me.

  There was no center. No locus. No core.

  It was nowhere. And yet, it was everywhere.

  I sucked in a shaky breath.

  If this was true, then it explained everything.

  The reason why my students had been affected — why they had begun developing a terrifying, unnatural affinity for mathematics — was because my qi was no longer governed by a normal cultivator’s meridians or techniques.

  It had no structure except mathematical structure.

  It did not flow through my body. It could not be condensed, because there was no region where it could pool. Instead, it dispersed into an uncountable set of infinitesimal points, each absorbing and transmitting some fundamental essence of itself.

  That was why it had only manifested in mathematics.

  I hadn’t been teaching my students mathematics.

  I had been transmitting qi through mathematics.

  The horrifying realization settled over me like a lead weight.

  If a normal cultivator imparted their Dao through their martial understanding, their insights into the world, their profound wisdom forged through years of enlightenment, then what had I been doing?

  I had no martial insights. No profound wisdom. No mystical Dao comprehension.

  All I had was math.

  So when my fragmented qi had bled into my surroundings, when it had unconsciously influenced those around me, it had done so through the only structure it could still recognise — the only structure it could still exist in.

  Mathematical truths.

  Without intending to, I had already been unknowingly cultivating through mathematics itself.

  The implications were staggering.

  Was there a path here? A method of understanding this state, of learning to control it? Could I shape my energy with logical rigor, with axiomatic precision? But how?

  Was I simply trapped within? A broken remnant of what had once been a cultivator, now reduced to a walking, breathing paradox?

  I clenched my fists.

  No, there was something deeper here. Something I had to understand.

  Cantor had looked into the nature of infinities and been struck by its grandeur. He had been met with resistance, with rejection from his peers, with disbelief that such an idea could exist. He had been condemned by those who saw his discoveries as an affront to reason itself.

  I was standing at the precipice of something equally unfathomable.

  I was not merely a man without qi. I was not merely a failed cultivator.

  I was a man whose very existence had been rewritten by mathematics.

  I closed my eyes and reached inward once more. Not with the expectation of gathering qi, not with the futile attempt to circulate it through non-existent pathways, but with the intent to understand.

  And in that infinite dust of shattered qi, I felt the echoes of something vast. Something beyond the mortal methods of cultivation.

  Something beautiful.

  Something terrifying.

  I had become a mathematical singularity, and I barely even properly knew my calculus.

  I exhaled sharply, my pulse hammering in my ears.

  Charles Hermite had once written, “There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation.”

  I now glimpsed it. And I had not just glimpsed it — I had become entangled with it, absorbed into its structure like a function swallowed by its own recursion.

  For all my years of regret, all my excuses, I had feared that mathematics was beyond me. That I was an outsider, a mere admirer of its beauty rather than a true participant in its great unfolding. But now? Now I was no longer merely a man looking in from the outside.

  I had stepped through the door and found myself standing in a space that should not exist.

  And I was entirely unprepared.

  I had no formal training. I had never attended a single proper university lecture on analysis, nor studied the full depths of set theory. I was a biologist — I could wax lyrical about haematopoietic lineages and single-cell transcriptomics, but true mathematics was beyond me. I was a man whose mathematical knowledge was fractured and incomplete, filled with half-remembered theorems and scattered proofs like the pages of an unfinished manuscript.

  And yet, Charles Hermite had also said, “We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.”

  That, too, I understood now.

  I was not the master of this power. I was its servant, dragged along its currents like a hapless traveler caught in the tides of an uncharted ocean. I had shattered my dantian with the arrogance of a man who thought he was escaping cultivation, only to create something infinitely more terrifying in its place. Something I didn’t know how to control.

  I could not afford to remain ignorant any longer.

  If I had been an ordinary cultivator, I would have had a path. A master to guide me. A sect to teach me techniques. Manuals and scrolls filled with knowledge accumulated across generations.

  I was alone.

  The thought had come to me like a reflex, a natural conclusion drawn from the absurdity of my situation. What manuals could I study? Who in this world had ever cultivated through Cantor dust? Who had ever transformed their qi into a nowhere-dense set of measure zero?

  But… was I truly alone?

  I had no master in the traditional sense. No sect, no grand elder to guide me through this unknown path. No lineage of sages passing down their wisdom in sealed scrolls, waiting to be unraveled by a promising disciple.

  And yet —

  Was that not precisely my position?

  The wisdom of my predecessors did not come to me in the form of immortal jade slips or cryptic manuals bound in silk and gold. But I had glimpsed the texts of sages long past. I had pored over their words, their symbols, their theorems carved into the foundation of reality itself.

  I was not alone.

  I had my masters.

  Not in the flesh, not bound by sect or bloodline, but in the vast and infinite inheritance they had left behind, their wisdom scattered across the annals of time like fragments of an ancient Dao.

  There was évariste Galois, the Troubled Genius, cut down before his time, burning with such unrelenting brilliance that he defied the very heavens. On the eve of his fatal duel, he raged against the limits of mortality itself, leaving behind an inheritance so profound that it reshaped the landscape of algebra. Even as he bled onto the streets of Paris, he knew his insights would live on, immortal. He was the Young Hero Who Challenged the Heavens, the unyielding force who had glimpsed a truth far beyond his years and, with his final breath, entrusted it to those who would follow.

  There was Leonhard Euler, the Grandmaster of Infinite Paths, a sage whose wisdom knew no equal. Where others stumbled, he walked effortlessly. The weight of analysis, number theory, graph theory — none of it burdened him. Even when blindness took his sight, his mind saw further than any before him, weaving together the fabric of mathematics with a grace that defied comprehension. His techniques — his methods — had become the foundation of an entire era. The Serene Master of the Unbounded Flow, guiding the river of knowledge with patience and precision.

  There was Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Sage of Hidden Depths. His genius had been apparent even as a child, a single insight revealing the arithmetic series in an instant. He had been a cultivator in his own right, advancing from mortal arithmetic to the divine truths of number theory and beyond. The Ever-Victorious Scholar, whose discoveries paved roads where none had walked before.

  There was Emmy Noether, the Matriarch of Symmetry, whose enlightenment had uncovered the deep, unbreakable bond between conservation laws and the underlying structure of reality. She had shattered barriers, not only in mathematics but in the very notion of what was possible. The Sage Who Walked an Unseen Path, forging forward when an ignorant world tried to deny her passage. Her insights had illuminated fields that would endure for eternity.

  There was Joseph-Louis Lagrange, the Grand Tactician of the Calculus of Variations, the strategist who found solutions where others found chaos. The Architect of Stability, who shaped the very foundations of celestial mechanics and optimisation, the one who saw beyond mere motion and into the deeper laws governing it.

  There was Pierre-Simon Laplace, the Prophet of Determinism, whose mind stretched to the limits of probability and celestial mechanics. The Oracle of Causal Chains, who glimpsed a world where every action had its outcome written in the stars, where nothing was left to chance.

  There was Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, the Master of Resonance, the one who understood the harmonic nature of the universe itself. The One Who Heard the Music of Heat and Waves, revealing that even the most chaotic patterns could be understood through decomposition into their fundamental frequencies.

  There was Ferdinand Eisenstein, the Shadowed Genius, taken too soon, yet leaving behind whispers of insights that would be pursued long after his passing. The Unfinished Luminary, whose brief but brilliant contributions stood like an unsolved equation — an inheritance waiting for the next to complete it.

  Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of masters.

  I had thought myself alone in this path.

  I had been a fool.

  I was not the first to walk a path of discovery with no master to guide me. I was not the first to stand before the vastness of the infinite and feel utterly insignificant. Every one of these grand sages had, at some point, been where I stood now — peering into the void, struggling against their own ignorance, clawing their way forward through sheer force of will.

  Their works had endured, not because they were bestowed upon chosen disciples in some hidden mountain temple, but because they had carved them into the very foundation of reality.

  And now, I stood on the edge of that inheritance.

  I had been a coward before. A man who loved mathematics but feared it, who admired from a distance but never had the courage to take that final step. But what was hesitation in the face of infinity? What was doubt before a lineage of sages who had already walked this path?

  I was their descendant in spirit, an inheritor of their knowledge. They had left behind cryptic, fragmented techniques, methods that had to be deciphered with patience and effort — was that not the Essence of Cultivation itself?

  Did a xianxia protagonist not stumble upon a half-burned scroll, an incomplete jade slip, the remnants of some grandmaster’s final insights, and spend years trying to grasp its meaning? What difference was there between me and them?

  Instead of martial manuals, I had treatises and proofs. Instead of sect elders, I had the writings of the masters.

  I had inherited a Dao.

  It was scattered, broken, cryptic, half-remembered — but it was mine.

  I clenched my fists.

  If a wandering cultivator could spend decades reconstructing a forbidden art from fragmented teachings, then I could study Lagrange’s equations until they burned themselves into my soul.

  If some ‘trash talent’ could decipher the lost techniques of an ancient sword saint by meditating over a single stroke left on a cave wall, then I could bloody damned well learn analysis from what I remembered of Euler’s works.

  If an orphaned child in some war-torn realm could ascend to the heavens by deciphering the remnants of a fallen sect’s knowledge, then I could —

  No, I would —

  Unravel the mysteries of mathematics.